Turbocharge Your Mac Productivity

Turbocharge Your
Mac Productivity

Allison Sheridan
November 2012

http://podfeet.com
Sunday, November 25, 12 1

slideshare.net/nosillacast/presentations


Random Finder Tricks
Quicklook
View photos, flip pages within a PDF, preview a video file
Command + Tab to Switch Apps
Command + ~ to switch windows in one app
Moving/Copying files between folders
Copy/Paste actually works
Option-drag copies rather than moves the file (hint: look
for the green plus to be sure you’re copying)


Tame the Left Sidebar
Use the left sidebar to get quick access to
things you use often
Drag in ﬁles, folders, applications, even
Cloud storage
Tired of them? Hold down command,
then drag and poof! They’re gone!
Remember the sidebar is visible in save/
open dialog boxes too
I’ll be sad when I don’t need my MacMania
folder in the sidebar any more!


Tame the Finder Toolbar

Did you know you can drag things into the Finder Toolbar too?
Applications, Files, Folders
I keep AppDelete in my toolbar so I can easily drag
applications up to delete them
One click access to commonly used ﬁles, command-drag to
remove


Customize Finder Toolbar Even Fur ther
Right click...


What IS That New Button?
Arrange ﬁles by
Kind
Application
Date Opened/Added/
Modiﬁed/Created
And my favorite By Size
Ever wanted to sort by
date in Column View but
thought you could only do
it in List View?


Conquer Column Widths
Can’t read the file names?
Double-click on the line
between the columns
Want to fix ALL the
columns at once?
Option-double-click on that same line & they all fit!


Finding Things with Spotlight
You’re looking for a file
You know who it’s from, or the file type, or around when
it was sent
But you can’t remember for the life of you where you
put it
Use the Spotlight Search box in any Finder window to
help you out!
Great filters on search - file type, length, size, dates, the
list is HUGE and there’s even a GUI for it


Find Things with Spotlight


Gestures
Why should you care about gestures?
To stop clicking so much - Carpal Tunnel be gone!
Oldies but goodies
Single tap to click
Two-ﬁngered tap gives you right click
Web Browsers - Two ﬁngered swipe goes back and
forward
Works in Safari, Chrome and Firefox
Wish it worked in the Finder!


Four Fingered Fun
See all your open applications by
four fingers straight up
See all your open windows in the
current application by four fingers
down
Four finger pinch in takes you to
Launchpad
Four finger pinch out takes you to Tip: resize!
your desktop B onus and
rag
nger ed d
Four fingers left/right switches 3Fi
between full-screen apps


Preview - Signatures
Ever been emailed a form to sign?
You have to print it, sign it, scan it back in and mail it
Worse yet, print it and then FAX it like it’s 1972?
Preview provides a very tricky solution
First sign a piece of paper
In Preview click on Signatures, then click the plus button
at the bottom
...


Preview - Signatures
Hold the signature up
to the blue line, and
Preview will capture it

From now on you can
simply tap the signature
button in the
Annotations toolbar to
drop in your signature


Trick Out your Dock
Hiding
Magniﬁcation
Play with the position on screen
Drag Applications, Files and Folders
into the dock - and out of the dock
Apple made it a LITTLE harder to
accidentally pull them out
Just drag farther till you see the
poof of smoke


Get More Info Out of Finder
Command-click the name at the top of a Finder window
to see the full path

Finder Show Path and Status Bars


The All-Knowing Get Info
⌘-i or File ➔ Get Info
Add comments for easier
spotlight searches
Find out how big your file is
Change what application opens
this file
Change what application opens all
files of this type
Figure out why your OS is yelling
at you about permissions


Where is That Menu Item?

I have a poor memory
I can never ﬁnd the menu item I’m searching for
Actually I’m too impatient to read!
Use the Help menu in any OSX App to highlight it!

My Eyesight Isn’t as Good as it Used to Be

Command + in Web Browsers and Mail.app will
increase the font size for you
This one even works in Windoze (with Cntrl +)
Control-Two Fingered scroll up to zoom in, scroll down
to zoom back out
System Preferences --> Universal Access

Play with how you like the screen to move
You can change if it’s control-scroll


Where’s that Darn Preference?

Use the search window and it will ﬁnd what you’re
looking for buried in the right preference

Remember I said I’m too lazy to read?


Find That Umlaut - Keyboard Viewer
Want to be cool and write
words like éclair with the
accent on the e?
Open System Preferences
Open Language & Text
Click on the Input Sources Tab
Check the box for Keyboard &
Character Viewer
Check the box to Show input
menu in menu bar
...

Keyboard Viewer cont.
Keyboard Viewer

Click on the Menu Bar app
Pop open the Keyboard Viewer
Keyboard Viewer Keyboard Viewer
With Option Key With Option-Shift Key

Umlaut: hold down Option-u Option-Shift-K
(and then another u for ü) for the Apple Symbol!

Character Viewer

Click on the
Menu Bar app

Pop open the
Keyboard
Viewer

Drag these ait! !
symbols into But W ORE
your text her e’s M
T


Save Your Favorite Characters


Random Keystroke Fun
Missing the Delete key from Windows?
Try function-Delete
Tired of clicking to the end of a line?
Try command-right arrow
Command-left arrow to go back


The Great & Powerful Option Key

Option click the Wiﬁ Signal in the Menu Bar

Don’t actually know why
you need to know this stuff...
but it’s cool!


Option-click on the speaker icon in the Menu Bar
this turns into this

Really useful to change your microphone or speakers
instead of opening up Sound Preferences


Command-i
Get Info
Command-Option-i
Show Inspector

They look the same, but Show
Inspector allows you to ﬂip
through a series of ﬁles with the
Arrow Keys to see each of their
info


Wonder where the Library disappeared to?
Hold down Option when you click on Go and it will be
revealed


Bonus Tip


TextExpander
All the tips so far have been built into OSX
What problems are we trying to solve?
The leading cause of injury in the ofﬁce work
environment is repetitive stress
You came to this class because you wanted to
become more efﬁcient
TextExpander is designed to type text for you when
triggered by a snippet
Example: I type te; to type TextExpander


TextExpander
Think about sentences or phrases or information you
type over and over again
Your name
Your address
Your signature
Intro paragraph to customer service email responses
Fill information in on forms - like logging into ship wiﬁ
TextExpander is the FIRST thing I load on a new
computer


TextExpander Preferences
Launch TextExpander
Set Preferences
Launch at login
Show TextExpander in
Menu Bar
Show TextExpander in
Dock


Create Our First Snippet
Open TextExpander from the menubar or Spotlight

New Snippet
1. Enter the phrase you
want typed
2. Enter the abbreviation
Test your snippet - it’s
that easy!


Things I Expand with TextExpander
Words that are camel-case (or might be):
TextExpander, Facebook, Dropbox, WordPress,
GarageBand, iStopMotion, LastPass, Spotlight, FaceTime
Things that are annoying to spell:
Final Cut Pro X, Bart Busschots, DiskInventoryX,
Blu-ray, Google+
Things I type all the time:
NosillaCast, NosillaCastaways, allison@podfeet.com
Temporary things:
Application names while doing a review


Setting the Trigger
You need to tell TextExpander when to understand it’s
time to do it’s job
I use ; as my trigger because I’ve never been entirely
clear on when to use semi-colons so it’s unlikely I’ll type
one in a sentence
You can append or prepend with the trigger, many
people use a comma before the snippet
There are many more options to play with


Auto-Correct
TidBITS has created a set of auto-correct snippets
2479 commonly misspelled words (like misspell) will be
corrected automatically for you
Easy to add using the Plus button at the top of the
screen
And they’re free! (not sure why actually)


HTML Snippets
TextExpander comes with HTML snippets
HTML syntax hard to remember
HTML annoying to place the cursor
TextExpander does it all for you
“,a” creates:
<a href=""></a> leaves cursor between quotes
“,img” creates:
<img src="" alt="" width="" height="" border="0" />


Fill In Forms
Example - you’re logging into ship wiﬁ every day
First Name, tab, Last Name, tab, room number, tab,
password, enter
Every. Single. Time.
Let’s create a form ﬁll to do it instead with one trigger
Start a new snippet


Create Fill-in Fields and Add Keys


More Bonuses
TextExpander syncs with Dropbox so you can have your
snippets on all your Macs
Stuck using Windoze sometimes? TextExpander Syncs
with Breevy from 16software.com
TextExpander shows you your statistics so you see what
it saves you
In 12 months
I saved 221,354 characters
expanded 9259 snippets,
Saved 12 hours and 30 minutes (@60 words/min).


Final Word
TextExpander is $34.99 from the Mac App Store or
from smilesoftware.com
If you have any questions about TextExpander
See Jean MacDonald from Smile


Email me at:
allison@podfeet.com


Turbocharge Your Mac Productivity

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